The Efficacy of Schema Therapy on Distress Tolerance, Emotion Regulation, and Resilience in Patients with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is based on intrusive thoughts which cause anxiety and compulsive behaviors that cause distress to patients. In this regard, this study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of schema therapy on distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and resilience in patients with OCD. The research method was a field-experimental pre-test-post-test type with a control group. 30 patients with OCD symptoms from psychology clinics in Rasht City in 2022 were selected as available, and assigned to the experimental (n=15) and control (n=15) groups. OCD (Sanavio, 1988), distress tolerance (Simons and Gaher, 2005), emotion regulation (Garnefski, et al, 2001), and resilience (Connor and Davidson, 2003) questionnaires were used to evaluate the groups. The experimental group’s 10 90-minute schema therapy sessions (Young et al, 2006) were followed by a second round of study questionnaire responses from the participants.  Finally, obtained data were analyzed by multivariate covariance analysis in SPSS-24 software (P .05). This study’s results showed that schema therapy significantly increases tolerance, attraction, assessment, regulation, positive strategies, and resilience, and decreases negative strategies in the patients with OCD (P .001). Based on the findings, it can be concluded that the treatment plan has been able to increase the mental health of patients with OCD.